Our World is Ash and Steel
by maybemozartheals
Summary: They pushed against each other so often, an endless tidal flow for dominance, and so often she thought that one time, this time, surely Paladin Danse would break, like she seemed to break everything, but through the days he proved her wrong, that they were steel and iron, not porcelain and glass; a brotherhood in their own right. (Edit: will be slow to update for a few weeks!)
1. Mindful Ignorance

**Chapter One:** Mindful Ignorance

The bullet bit into her skin with no warning, it's travel through the thick air unaccompanied by sound or the familiar flash of the glass in a sniper's scope catching green nuclear sunlight. It jumped along her jawline on her left side, garnering blood but missing bone, tagging the corner of her ear on its way into the sky behind her, leaving an angry sting and liquid fire dripping down her neck. She inhaled sharp and fast in surprise, unwarranted, her hand abandoning its grip on her rifle without her telling it to, unconsciously rising to asses the damage, to press away the pain, to hold her flesh together in the case that the raider was a good shot.

He wasn't.

Nora shifted, her fingers returning red but steady, sure, the stiff fabric of her stale orange uniform and the makeshift leather armor she had retrofitted it with tugging harshly at her stomach as she dragged herself, laying prone, against the concrete and exposed piping of the roof. She stole a hard look at the line of buildings that hid the horizon about 120 yards to her northwest, the supposed direction of the sniper, before rolling over onto her back and behind the cover of an exhaust vent, pulling her gun off of the railing it had been supported by and down with her. She stopped, listened, breathed, felt the strength of the ground at her back, counted the drops of blood that fell like tears from her face, breathed again, and then she had crawled the length of the roof, her shoulder sliding along the cool metal of the vent, reappearing on the opposite side to line up her shot. Her fingers slipped back onto the trigger quick and easy, her brow pressing hard against the scope, comforting, and with bittersweet satisfaction she watched as her bullet shot across the block and ate straight through the side of the last raider's head.

Finally.

"Outstanding shot, soldier."

Without turning, she threw a quick thumbs up to the voice that came from behind her, close and deep and reassuring, keeping the opposite building in her sights until she had cleared each window, scoured each wall, upturned each piece of fallen debris through her scope, unyielding, catching the last vestiges of stubborn life leak from the sniper's body in a pool before withdrawing. She wiggled away from the ledge with an adrenaline-fueled smile, twisting her body to face the towering figure that remained patiently crouched near cover.

"Fuckin' A was what that was," she said, voice still hushed, steely eyes bubbling in silent laughter as she took into stride the one of many disapproving looks her sponsor had given her that day. "-sir."

Paladin Danse unfurled himself from his awkward position, his own laser rifle gripped tight in careful, calloused hands and held at the ready, always at the ready, knees pushing off the ground with a series of groans and guttural cries of protest from his suit of power armor — as subtle as it was battery-efficient — and stood, straightening his spine and unknotting his muscles with a sigh, nearly eight feet of monstrous steel and, somewhere, hidden and almost indistinguishable, man. He walked his hard feet into the hard ground until he came up beside her and surveyed the skyline with eyes soft as caramel, thinking, regrouping, running on auto-pilot, replaying the day and its unending stream of completed missions as if they might've missed some, surely, inconsequential detail or forgotten some protocol, as if his mind was as machine as his armor, gears shifting noiselessly, only to stop suddenly to look down at Nora with a frown.

"You were hit," he stated in his usual monotone, so bland and matter-of-factly, but the concern staining his face, the darkness under his eyes that she only just seemed to notice took her off guard nonetheless.

"Oh, yeah," she looked away absently only for a second to touch the fire at her cheek, still wet and sticky, before her gaze snapped back up to his with a strength she could have only learned from him. "I mean, no. Barely nicked me. It'll leave a scar, but that's it." She shrugged, struggled to her knees and quickly smiled up to him, a lopsided, childish thing, and reached out a hand. "Now help me up so we can go find some booze."

Danse grunted, frown deepening, grabbing hold of her forearm and hoisting her up with a gentleness almost unnatural for someone of his stature. "Negative, knight. We will bring these stolen supplies back to Cambridge and then return to the Prydwen. You'll need stitches for that." He motioned to her wound with a finger, momentarily inspecting it with a thoroughness and care that brought heat to the fleshy parts of her face, before he let go of her arm and squared his shoulders. "Understood?"

"Sir, yes, sir, understood, paladin, sir!" She declared with mocking enthusiasm, bringing her hand to her forehead in a overly dramatic salute as she bent to pick up her rifle. "But you better be buying me a drink after this."

"Purified water is provided free of charge at the Pryd-"

"You know what I mean."

She thought she saw him smiling as they took the fire escape down from the roof with the Brotherhood supplies that the raiders had stolen, or at least, as much of a smile that Danse was capable of, but it could've just been a trick of the light. Though she tried her damnedest to concentrate on the rooftops they cautiously passed under and the faint beginnings of a firefight they began to hear off in the distance, screams and emptied casings echoing between the brick, broken buildings, Nora found herself trying to remember if Danse had ever smiled before, and she thought about how much she'd like to see him do it again.

* * *

Their relationship was far from perfect, but she was in no position to judge, not after what she had seen, not after what she had become the moment she left the vault. She was every bit as hard as he was now, just a bit rougher around the edges, less refined, a little more porous, more open. He tried to iron her out, ease her into the codes, the protocols, but after maybe the first week since he had first introduced her to the Prydwen as an initiate he had given up on trying to change her. He let her breathe, because he understood, in that eerie, silent, all-seeing way of his. He never did stop his lectures; ever the Paladin and she ever his inexperienced knight, and though she always complained and rolled her eyes, she secretly enjoyed his liltless recital of the rulebook he had stowed away in his head, memorized since a time long before her, his soothing timbre a welcome distraction, the religious repetition and thrum of syllables slipping off his tongue making up verses to a song she sang to herself when her thoughts veered down darker paths. There was nothing quite like the numb, mindless acceptance of following in Danse's tactical and militaristic bearing to help her forget, if only for a little while, but there were lines that she wouldn't cross. Inevitably their ideals would clash, and she would accidentally call a synth a person in conversation, or he would refuse to help a group of stranded ghouls just because they were ghouls until she temporarily remedied his unfortunate outlook with enough berating to split his power armor in two, and he was spiteful, and angry, and sometimes she would lose him inside his head, or he would just stop talking, _why won't you just talk to me,_ and they would burn together bitterly in the same boat until he apologized first, hesitant and stoic, knowing full well that if he didn't, no-one would.

They pushed against each other so often, an endless tidal flow for dominance, and so often she thought that one time, this time, surely he would break, like she seemed to break everything, but through the days he proved her wrong, that they were steel and iron, not porcelain and glass, and they fit into each other like nothing else did, a brotherhood in their own right, and she fought and cursed aloud and ran rebellious in the streets when he asked her to _wait,_ but they were real, and honest, and so fucking easy, and she never felt right again without a gun in her hand and Danse at her back. She told him before anyone about her family, her son, the hole that devoured more and more of her every day; she wanted him to know, and he listened. He knew what she needed, when to give her space, when to prop her up against his shoulder, when to shut her up, and though it was three months ago that she had saved his life at the police station, with every day passed under his charge he more than repaid any debt he owed her, and she couldn't help but wonder if she could've given more back. She needed him, in and out of battle; she needed his absolute trust, but did she give him hers?

She had already come to the conclusion long ago that she was a selfish person, and a horrible mother. With each step she took not actively searching for Shaun she felt a piece of her humanity fall away. Every smile, every little happiness, every moment she spent with anything from this world was a moment stolen away from her baby boy, but it was too much, and all she wanted to do was to stop the pain, to keep herself from crumbling into dust, shattering into a million tiny pieces, just to survive for a little while longer, and she hated herself for it. She hated that she would rather be dead, that she had given up so quickly, that she was using Danse, her friend and respected superior, as a reason to abandon her search for her child, as if he were a drug and the Brotherhood's rhetoric the fumes that she pretended laced her life with purpose. She hid her pain, or otherwise hid behind it like a shield, and almost blindly she let it interfere with her work, let her hand hesitate on the trigger, her curses and taunting towards Danse strike to deeply, too close to his heart when he trapped her in a corner, and she gave him not the explanations nor the apologies he deserved, and she dug herself deeper. She knew she was wrong, that she shouldn't be so difficult, that she shouldn't be so loud, but she had been silenced for more than two-hundred years. She knew that she should be better, more grateful, that everything that she had grown to find comfort in was meaningless in retrospect, but she didn't owe the world a goddamned thing, and she considered her mindful ignorance a bliss.

In the war raged between her selfish desires and her complete disgust for what she had become, her selfishness always won, and she took shelter in the great shadow of her Paladin and his loyalty and his pride, knowing that he would never turn to her for anything in return.

 _Luckily for the Brotherhood of motherfucking Steel._


	2. Cornered

**Chapter Two:** Cornered

"Knight?"

The sweet, familiar rumble of his voice drew her absolute attention if not her title, and with it she realized that she had been staring at the wall for an unhealthy amount of time, at least according to the unadulterated look of worry that pulled on the masculine planes of her superior's face, weathered and dark and hovering expectantly just breaths away from her. She felt an unexpected pang of guilt, fervent and swift, and gave him a half-hearted grin before turning away again, shifting her position on the bare, dirt floor and reveling for a moment in the satisfying pop of her spine as she straightened it.

"Paladin."

They were holed up in a cramped, deserted building on the outskirts of the city, having been forced to find shelter when a yellow storm and the oily dark of approaching night restricted their visibility, not to mention that they were exhausted as utter shit after having nearly uprooted the entire Cambridge area on Elder Maxson's goose chase; he and Proctor Quinlan had decided that locating the source of an unknown, sporadic electrical transmission that had made an appearance on their charts was to be tasked unto the first sorry faces they bumped into — because why not — completely disregarding how recently the operatives in question had returned from a previous mission, their still-healing wounds, and probably also laughing maniacally behind their backs. She and Danse dutifully complied, though after the third hour of running up and down the same street holding a radar screen above her head like an asshole, Nora had admittedly started to feel a little irritable even before the acid rain started falling on her. Danse had lead her from the maze of once familiar buildings, barking out orders, keeping the soldier in his voice despite the sad hilarity of the situation, and thus she found herself cold and hungry and wet in the middle of a plywood shack, empty-handed in regards to her mission, and reduced to staring at rotting wood as if it was going to start telling her its life story at any moment.

 _Ad Vic-fucking-torium._

"Are you alright?"

Danse had stepped from his power armor only moments before, and in their closeness she could see beads of sweat pool at his brow and fall down his cheek, catching in his stubble and glinting in the cold light of his discarded helmet's flashlight, the perpetual griminess of him seemingly untouched. It was always strange to see him like this, so naked and small, and so much more human than she was used to without the plates of abrasive steel that had more than once stopped a bullet to his heart. She was thankful for it, and for the protection it offered them both, but she enjoyed the rare moments when he gave it leave to rest, when she could remind herself of the overwhelming fragility of him that he routinely forgot existed, when they could speak and look at each other without her feeling distinctly intimidated by the sheer power of him. She could steal a touch some nights, when he shed his fatalism and his artificial confines, just a brush of skin that was real and warm when their shifts rotated or when his eyes looked too sad in the shadows of a safehouse after a battle that lasted too long, and she began to realize that he couldn't hide his heartache well without that metal barrier to protect him.

She would've taken this time to watch him, assessing and disassembling, the question he asked of her forgotten, but the stark orange of his uniform distracted her as it pulled and wrinkled in dancing rivulets over his muscles at work, moving him closer, and her awareness of him increased tenfold. His body thumped unceremoniously when he sat to join her, folding his legs stiffly beneath him, and she quickly met his eyes, effectively hiding her unease from sight as she watched his fierce attempts to read her face, willing her thoughts to bare themselves to him, simple curiosity withheld from his features only by the deep frustration in his knitted brows. The intensity of him so suddenly intruding her space took away her breath and lodged it somewhere deep in her throat, turning to hot acid like the rain she heard still drumming against the roof, and she supposed he thought she must have been turning his question over in her mind in the long heartbeats it took for her to find it again. She swept her fingertips over the raw chords of the stitching that now braided across her jaw unconsciously as if it would bring her some comfort, the flesh still unsurprisingly red and half-split, Knight Captain Cade's handiwork in the time he was allowed before they left the Prydwen still an impressive thing.

"I'm fine," she tried, but it sounded strangled, shallow, and with an exasperated sigh she turned the tables, looking away to watch her soggy boots dry. "Are you?"

He flexed out his fingers, dropped his shoulders, the jutting square of his jaw clenching in her peripheral vision, unhappy with her response, almost uncomfortably so. "Yes, I am," he announced, the sound rushed and annoyed, choosing not to ignore her flimsy attempt at getting him talking but throwing it back in her face all the same, rotating his body so that he leaned toward her, asking, open. "So long as you are in my care I would appreciate your cooperation. If something is troubling you, I insist that you tell me what it is."

His persistence sent an unwarranted jolt of anxiety down the back of her neck, and she wondered how it was that he thought anything was wrong with her at all. He knew her fears, her story, he had seen her bleed and seen her kneel over in a pain he had bloodied his own hands to silence, had stood witness to her tears, if only once; what else did he want from her? What could he have seen in her cold, distant eyes that had instilled this idea that she needed him to help her, that he needed some guarded truth to be revealed, here and now, for both their sakes? Though the thought that he could so easily see through her was maddening, she patiently reminded her worse self that he was a friend, forgiving, uncut marble, every inch of her measly strength doubled and epitomized, that he could hold up a weight heavier than anything she had ever held on her shoulders and then some. The scar that sliced through his one heavy eyebrow twitched in his muted onslaught, and reluctantly she began to yield, exhaustion taking its toll on her defenses, on her bones, allowing some semblance of the age she felt show on her face, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead stained with the end-product of successful combat.

"I'm just tired. Of ... a lot." It wasn't a lie, but her lips closed around the sound of more words before they could spill and he could hear the weakness in them, and she pivoted to look at him, finding acceptance and a quiescent knowing marking the corners of his mouth, declaring herself the winner before the race had even started. His eyes were calmer, the slowing patter of gentle rain above her head, when he turned to her again.

"You haven't requested leave to continue your search for your son." He stopped, watching her, absorbing the quickness of her inhale and the flick of her eyes, rewording his next statement in his mind until it was softer. "Do you need anything?"

 _Damn him._

"Yes," she breathed, too aware of how close her arm rested next to his, pulling away. "No, I -" she laughed, a broken sound, over her struggle, settling her gaze on the ceiling for a moment before meeting him head-on. "I just need more time, that's all. I need to ... fix this -" she gestured towards all of herself. "- before I see him. Before he sees me."

He stared back, unrelenting, unfazed, taking everything in stride, though she thought she saw something small and horrible flicker through him, something she had hoped she would never have to face in another, especially not him. _Pity_.

He shook his head. "I see nothing that needs fixing, soldier." He added the last word as insurance, to distance himself, if only slightly. The edges of his mouth twitched into something akin to reassuring, but she couldn't swallow it. She swung up in a single movement from her place on the floor, breaking their contact, removing him from her thoughts forcefully and with a detachment so bitter that he could feel the sparks tickle the hair on his forearms, finding something slightly more interesting in the chest plate of his power armor, her arms tight and intertwined, holding her together from behind her back.

"That's only because you like me so damn much."

He remained seated, allowing her to walk untethered, to kick up dust by his feet, stretch out her tired arms like a cat feigning disinterest in her prey. "You don't think your son likes you?"

She spun on her heels, ambling across the room, bringing a chill with her that spread past the walls and out into the night with a vengeance. She shrugged without looking at him. "No."

"That's ridiculous," he started, not having to crane his neck much to glare up at her, seeking out her eyes so that he could burn his disapproval into them, to make sure she knew that she was wrong, that she was being unreasonable, so that he could help her. She refused to let him, and in a single gesture, loud and harsh, crossed her arms over her chest and signaled the end of that and any further conversation. He didn't take the hint. "You're letting your paranoia blind your judgment. No matter how much time that has passed -"

"But time _has_ passed," she spit as if he were oblivious to the fact, as if he were a child that didn't understand, and heat rushed through her veins with the first ripple of rage and her lips twitched behind the growing volume of her voice. "Ten _years_ have passed. That's not something I can just ignore. I mean, I almost didn't recognize my own goddamned son in Kellogg's memories; how could I ever expect him to recognize me, to know what I am to him, to believe me when I tell him?" She turned away fully from his view, the ruts between her brows eating into her face, and let the sharpness of her own words cut her right down the middle. "He has a new family, now." _And he's safer in the Institute than he ever would be with me._

Her pain didn't go unregistered, and his hands trembled around what she had given him, knowing well his strength and how easily he could crush it and feeling quite nearly fearful over her vulnerability, but she was his soldier, and to him he saw only someone who needed guidance, his guidance, so when he hardened his voice he thought it was for her. "When I first met you, there was no mission more important to you than finding Shaun. That you would abandon him so quickly -"

He witnessed his fault in judgment whip out before him like the crack of green lighting and strike her before it was too late.

She turned on him at full force, eyes livid, her son's name still lingering on the air in Danse's unforgiving voice, a breach in privacy, a heat on her cheeks that spurned her on, and leapt up to him with a finger pressed down into his chest. "Don't you dare." He was shocked into stillness for a breath of a second, all movement but for the fuming shadows on him gone from his face until he pressed hard into her accusatory finger with a frown, slowly heaving forward to stand, whether threatened by her height over him in that moment or preparing to stop her from running out the door, she couldn't say. She bent her neck to keep him in view as he unloaded the terrifying arsenal of the feet he had on her even without his armor, and the edges of him burned red as her vision narrowed into daggers. "Don't you dare assume to know what I do or what I feel, Paladin. To say that I'm abandoning my son now would be like to say that you abandoned Cutler." She watched as he began to deflate just as quickly as he had risen to the challenge, his eyes losing some of their steel, and the regret that she felt, the betrayal that barraged her in choking waves that rolled off of his body the moment she said it was more than she could bear. Her corruption of such personal information, secret information, a name that he had spoken to her in confidence now turned against him made her tongue feel gritty and her stomach start to twist, but she didn't show it, and she remained standing against him, resolute. His face was scored with a deep and unwavering sorrow, just barely revealing itself but always there, a hungry bleakness that stole away the honeyed light in him and turned him grey, and he worked to push it down with a swiftness that only came with practice.

"Then why do you run?" He tried, and though his arms hung limp and useless by his sides his voice rang out with full-bodied capability, and he blinked down at her, his chin hanging high from over the crown of her matted hair, trudging on.

She faltered, suddenly unsure of the truth, and she allowed her arms to fall parallel to his, anger still blooming behind her ribs hindered by the confused hurt that radiated off of him. She breathed heavy into the narrow space between them and watched as the warmth of her rose, tentative, in smokey tendrils against the winter chill. "I don't know," she said plainly, trying not to feel the hollowness in the words and failing, and desperately she added: "I know you want to help me, Danse. I know you want to ... to know what the fuck I am, but-" The hiss of his exhale was steady and patient, and he had closed his eyes, his careful hands which she hadn't realized were clenched going slack against his thighs.

"I know enough," he told her, smooth and cool iron, and she expected to see him angry, or resentful, or mocking, but his eyes had opened again, and he peered down at her through lashes that framed utter warmth, and she saw one side of his mouth pull up in a half-smile, and his compassion was mesmerizing. She knew what he was saying, what he meant: _you're enough. I'm sorry. Tell me in your own time_ , and she didn't deserve him. She released the tension in her face and nodded, just slightly, suddenly wanting nothing more than accept the peace he had offered her and to forget, for them both to forget, and to let the night carry them away to someplace better, and so she stepped out and away from the ring. She thought she saw his hand lift to reach for her, hesitant and heavy, fluttering in and out of of her vision with a nervous tick, but she was tired and her mouth was still cotton and her guilt still pounded through her like the din of war, so she quickly slid back down to the floor to sit at his feet before she had the chance to feel it — whatever it was. He joined her after a long, agonizing pause and scooted back to lean his head against the furthermost wall, pools of purple-blackness settling in around his eyes, relenting his rummaging through her soul to slump against the weight of the evening with a resurgence of stoic poise. He found the same solace that she had in the the wood planks on the opposite wall, a thickness separating them like a tangible presence.

"I'll take first watch. We leave at sunrise," he said, his voice too loud, too perfect, and suddenly he was the Paladin again, his expression unreadable, so easily wiped clean after the turmoil that had nearly raged upon it, and he reached over for something at his side before tossing a well-worn blanket into her lap. "Get some sleep, knight."

She took the fabric and bunched it into her hands, scratching like sandpaper, and looked to him as if for guidance, for some semblance of what to say, of what to end it with, but she saw that he had already accepted the night for what it was, and she was at a loss. Half of her didn't want to leave it at that, to let him take away what he took; it wanted to scream at him, make her pound her fists against the flat expanse of his chest, call him a thief for stealing into her like that, to so gently leave her with his little comfort and his graciousness as if he had the right, but the other half was stronger. She could've argued that he couldn't fix her, but then, he didn't want to fix her, and she knew that; he wanted her, his knight, his sister, his friend, just as she was. This was for her sake. He had given her the chance to stop lying to her herself, to change, to be something different, offering the sturdiness of his understanding like a crutch for her to lean on, but she was blind, and stupid, and pieces of her were broken, and when she curled up on her side with the blanket that smelled like him, her arm under her head as a pillow, she fought hard to keep her eyes from stinging.

"Goodnight, Danse." She whispered finally before her body fell under, and it was a long time before she heard him respond, faint behind the haze of near-sleep.

"Goodnight."

 _Nora._


	3. Ball and Chain

**Chapter 3:** Ball and Chain

The sky was unusually clear, and the rays of morning sunlight that scorched her skin were sharp and bright even after having been filtered through the layer of grime that clung to the airship's wide windows like ashy moss. The view from up so high, as it was from off the Prydwen's bow-facing deck, should not have remained as impressive to someone who had admired it as thoroughly and as often as she, and though she was not habitually prone to letting her emotions gain the upper hand in the presence of her self-proclaimed _betters_ , Nora's breath was nonetheless stolen away just as quickly as it had been her first time seeing it, her fingertips buzzing and her heart surging with something raw and unfamiliar; pride perhaps, or some variation of it. She could almost taste the chill of the air as she dared to move her feet closer to the steel's edge, sour and thick but thrilling even so, her toe touching glass so as to stand over the world as a humble observer. She was pleasantly surprised to see that the characteristic gloominess of the airport and the surrounding beaches below had been swept away along with the tide, seemingly by decree of some higher power, and despite the monotonous trumpeting that continually erupted from the man, the great Elder Maxson who lurked by her side, who's boots left scars on the floor in their wake as he paced and who's hands rose and fell to the swell of his rhythmical curses, she had decided that the day would be a good one.

Maxson obviously disagreed with her.

"- and should you choose to disrespect your title and the brothers and sisters that fight for the betterment of this Commonwealth by ignoring chain of command _again,_ I will gladly exchange your service for that of one who will take their responsibility to the Brotherhood seriously. That you would disobey direct orders to return for reassignment is a punishable offense in its own right, but to subsequently jeopardize the safety of the superior officer assigned to you in an attempt to singlehandedly dismantle one of the largest known Super Mutant outfits in our range of operations is unacceptable. Furthermore ..."

She threw her gaze out of the window again, watching the water and the breeze that whipped it and wanting desperately to flee. She remembered well the outrageous offense that her Elder had so eloquently reiterated for seemingly all on the floor to hear, and though it was certainly reckless and perhaps even stupid on her part (of all days to forget her pack of back-up ammo), the thought that she or anyone for that matter could force Paladin Danse into any life-threatening situation was almost entertaining in its absurdity; he had wanted the fight more than she had.

They had been tense and, frankly, spiteful after leaving the little shack that had provided them shelter throughout the night outside of Cambridge, and an early morning target practice on a couple of mutants that had unknowingly crossed their paths seemed like a simple way to lift their spirits, to awaken their tired and aching bodies and remind themselves of some of their goddamned _purpose._ Those few mutants had quickly turned into a horde, and though they were in mutual agreement that whatever source that had spewed them out was no longer allowed to continue its misaligned function as Scourge Of The Earth, it was the Paladin who discovered their hive, and he who screamed in a mad and unadulterated loathing as he cut into the thick of their green and gnarled masses. The pair of them were half-dead when the vertibird team found them, but she only remembered feeling utterly and distinctly alive.

The incessant sound of the Elder that had served as white noise to accompany her reverie was suddenly silenced as he realized that he had failed to keep his subordinate's attention, folding his arms against the leather at his chest and staring holes into the side of her until she could feel her flesh crawl, inescapable, and what she saw in his face when she finally did turn, all tense and twisted rage, the dark of his unshaven jaw and the shadows under his brows defying even the sun's direct touch, made her forget the near decade that she had on him. The scars certainly aged him; tears through his skin like an illegible map that lead to where he had buried the last of his innocence, and so did his eyes, hardened by years of discipline and sharpened into something so brutally inhuman, so violent and quick to forsake the unworthy, to devour the weak, and when she tried to imagine him with the eyes he might've had in his youth, soft blue and curious, she found that he never quite fit them. He was hollow, empty, a blank space of concrete wall, his only passions his faction and the position he held in it, his only notable traits his arrogance and his hatred for all things broken, as if everything else had been unknown to him since birth, and try as she might to stand against the force of him, to hate him and the eyes he had stolen from someone older, to spit on his Brotherhood's precious code of _fucking_ ethics, he terrified her more than she would ever be willing to admit.

That didn't mean she couldn't fake it, though.

"As I understand it, we succeeded in dismantling that outfit; or did you not get that far into Paladin Danse's report, sir?" She mimicked his stance, crossing her arms, hoping that she didn't look as small as she felt or else be eaten alive. He was easily twice her size, though still considerably and comically _less_ than Danse, and before she could stop it from shoving its way into her thoughts the image of the Paladin staring down Maxson in her place lent her a gratified boldness.

"You only 'succeeded' after one of our vertibirds scheduled for supply pickup at the police station happened across your position and eliminated half of the targets for you, _Knight._ " He spit out her title as if it burned his tongue and took a single step closer, threatening, willing her into a corner as if he had control over her very bones, as if he commanded the blood in her veins and the breath in her lungs and the heart that ran rampant behind her ribs. She sneered.

"I was under the impression that I was doing my duty -"

 _"_ Then you misunderstand the extent of what is expected of you," he said matter-of-factly, just as quick to forget their age difference as she had been. "You were assigned a menial task; if upon completion of this task you discovered the possible location of a sizable mutant threat, you would be expected to make a mark of it on your map, or perhaps radio it in, so that it could be dealt with resourcefully and tactfully, and by a team of well-supplied field operatives trained extensively in combat — training in which you are greatly lacking. Your _duty_ was to locate the source of an unidentified transmission in the Cambridge area and then to immediately report back to me, and you have failed in both of those regards."

"Then discharge me," she said, her eyes undaunted and all-consuming, the challenge in her statement ill-received as the larger man bristled with a resurgence of fury. "If I have truly failed the Brotherhood so completely in this, then throw me out, and you won't ever see me again; if not, then I deserve more consideration than what you're giving me."

His silence, though edged with a poisonous warning, served as his answer, and she chose to ignore the slight tremor that ran through him as the Elder Maxson nearly became undone before her. He was right about one thing; she had failed, if not him then the Brotherhood, or Danse, or herself, and though she was a stubborn woman she wasn't adverse to learning from her mistakes. She shrugged, shifting her weight. "If you want me to tell you that I'm sorry, fine: I made a lapse in judgment, and I'm sorry for that, but, _please_ , don't play this game with me. You need me, Maxson, and we both know that I'm not going anywhere."

 _So shove it up your ass._

He seemed to deeply deliberate his options — whether or not he should punch her in the gut amongst them, if the slightly unhinged look he was giving her was any indication — slowly burning from the inside out, pursing his lips and shooting fire into her with his eyes and refusing to admit defeat like the half-child that he was even when she saw an echo of it reverberate through him like the aftermath of nuclear war. She was catching him off guard, and he hid the realization that she had won from her with commendable strength, as if it would change his very makeup, strip him of his rank right then and there if he misstepped and let slip any betraying emotion, as if he cared that she might see him, know him and his humanity, and no longer shrink in submission in his shadow. He mistook weakness for empathy, and fear for respect, and to watch his aimlessness battle with his pride exhausted her to the core. With a heavy exhale he settled on a path, pinching the chiseled bridge of his nose between two fingers before stirring his body, feigning interest elsewhere, finding solace in anything but the pale planes of her face. "You're prohibited from taking part in field work until Paladin Danse deems you capable; he will be informed of this conversation. Until then I expect your utmost diligence in assisting Proctor Ingram in her search for the Institute."

She nodded, understanding. "That's fair."

"Is it?"

He said it like a dismissal, and after a few seconds she worked to move her feet away, thinking herself free and starting to bow her head in leave before he had overtaken her again, choking her with his presence, compromising her mobility with but a few deadly strides, and she was confused. She tried to flinch away, his chest standing a breath from her chin as if he meant to smother her, the air around him turning hot and electric, vehement and fuming, and once again he had secured the advantage and emerged victorious without so much as touching her. His voice snaked into her ear: "I will not take further insubordination lightly," and the words turned her skin to ice where they struck her, and she swallowed hard, looking down into the quilted collar of his jacket and refusing his stare's pull of gravity, knowing well already what she would find there; the vindictiveness of him was everywhere, and all at once. "Do I make myself clear, Knight?"

"Yes, sir," was all she could manage even though she was screaming on the inside, but it satisfied him enough, and he tore himself away as quickly as he had come, turning to the closest window with no more explanation than the whisper of the rubber soles of his boots scraping the floor, and he grasped the iron railing in his merciless hands until she could see his knuckles turn white. She refrained from gasping for breath, or from cursing aloud, or from laughing at his pettiness, his horrifying immaturity, and reached out towards the wide metal frame of the exit with a long and desperate step and a hard glare into the back of his head, almost not hearing him as he dared to speak a final time upon her flight.

 _"Dismissed."_

She looked forward to the day that she had the balls to tell him to go fuck himself.

* * *

The empty hallways that lead to the sleeping quarters were a welcome sanctuary from the command deck, and though the tight walls and windowless rooms were unmistakably reminiscent of a pre-war prison, she had found herself calling the place 'home' more and more often. She passed by the mess hall and the sounds of mindless eating and took the stairs two at a time, nodding to her sisters and her brothers when she had to, ever so courteous, smiling at the few faces that she remembered the names to and leaving them with one-word responses to their probing; she was still a stranger to so many of them, trust being such a rare and precious thing to those who had begun to hide even technology from the people they had pledged to serve, and she didn't blame them for their wariness, or for the whispers behind her back. She was not a trustworthy person. She walked with soft toes and quick eyes until she reached the furthermost door in the airship, tucked away beneath the dim glow of a solitary red lamp, hardly ever opened, making sure it closed well behind her before emerging onto the triangular balcony on the other side, and with a sigh allowed her shoulders to slump under the weight of the small and damaged world they carried. The nerves that ran down the length of her still rattled just beneath the surface, and she cursed herself, cursed her weakness, damned the body that betrayed her and the failure of her tongue in the face of nothing more than a child at the helm of an army of tin men. _Stupid._ She squeezed her eyes closed, released the vice that gripped at her chest like Maxson's furious hands, the stress that had coiled around her muscles unfurling into the daylight like tangible mist, evaporating from her bruised skin and the scratches that stung at her in protest, leaving her with nothing to concentrate on but the pain; she had promised to return to Cade after the Elder debriefed her, but she figured her body wouldn't completely fall apart if she took a few minutes more to herself.

She fell against the railing, draping her arms over and into the empty air, free at last, feeling the briskness of it through her uniform and consequently resonating down her spine despite the warmth of the sun on her face. She reached down without thinking and grabbed at the zipper on the outside of her thigh, drawing a worn pack of cigarettes from its place in her left pocket and swiping her thumb over the familiar label, nostalgia muddling her senses like a fog rolling in from the sea. She was surprised that she had managed to find it, tucked away in its usual place between the bookcase and the wall of her and Nate's old room; when she had first scoured the house in Sanctuary in search of something familiar, something that she could touch, that could shake her awake after she had left the vault and found Codsworth tending to a skeleton of her former life as if it were still salvageable, she had found that time, though harsh and fickle, had preserved its fragile contents relatively well. What the raiders hadn't stolen or mold or rust hadn't eaten had remained undeniably and gut-wrenchingly _hers_ , and though to see it all in such disrepair seemingly after she had just left it had so completely shaken her, her home had still been very nearly a home, and the fact brought her some comfort. Amongst Shaun's things she found only misery, a deep guilt that she could not face in that or any moment, but she remembered sitting on the frame of what was once her bed for a long while, knowing the peace that her room once harbored as if it were still intact, finding her husband's dog tags in a little metal box in the closet and wrapping them around her palm until the chain burned her, and then, completely by chance, the cigarettes, stuck to the wood of the decaying furniture like velcro. Nate had swore that he never smoked, but after he came back that last time from a war she now knew that he had fought in vain, after what he must've seen and what he never confessed but she always feared was there, she knew he kept a couple packs hidden, just in case. She could imagine one hanging out of the side of his mouth, caught just so between his white teeth, and the memory, vibrant and so sickly sweet, was jarring against the backdrop of the brown and churning wasteland below her, having turned to ash more than two-hundred years ago.

Her heart ached as she pulled a single cigarette from the tatters of beige cloth, rolling it between two gentle fingers before lifting it to her lips, holding it there as she reached for the matches. She struggled with the box for a moment, out of practice, cupping her hand around the first spark and carefully bringing the flame up to her face with the other, ignoring her husband's chastising voice in her ear telling her to drop it, telling her that it would do her more harm than good as if he were truly there beside her, touching her, holding her, as if he couldn't see that she was already dying anyway, but suddenly she caught movement, a shadow shifting behind her out of the corner of her eye, and Nate had gone. In her haste she emptied her hands and spun to face it, whatever it was, fear jolting her senses alive and adrenaline rooting her feet to the ground, prepared, and she instinctually crouched into a defensive stance.

"What -"

Paladin Danse stood in the shadow of the Prydwen's hull, watching her, armor-less and recently bandaged, having the decency at least to look embarrassed as Nora visibly retracted the assumption that he was some faceless attacker, a ghost long-dead come to haunt her. "Oh, Jesus Christ, Danse," she breathed, relaxing her posture with an annoyed glare thrown in his general direction, pushing the heel of her palm into her temple before bending to pick up the cigarette that she had let drop from her mouth.

To think that she could actually die of a heart attack when there was such a thing as a fucking _Deathclaw_ running around.

He had taken a step closer, lifting his hands and carrying them in from of him as if to further prove that he meant her no harm, and his face looked worried. "I'm sorry. I was already here when you came out, but you looked like you were ..." He quickly shifted his attention to the floor, kneeling beside her to pick up the discarded matchbox that she had begun searching for. "... like you were thinking, and it didn't seem like an appropriate time to disturb you."

She peered up at him, brows furrowing, unsure of what to make of his fumbling, the uncertainty in his stature, this uncharacteristic nervousness. His neck had grown red, and though his expression was impassive he fought hard to avoid her gaze like it was the plague, and she had never seen so much _happen_ in him in so short an amount of time. She took note of the dark circles beneath his wide brown eyes, the pull on his shoulders, the dragging of his feet, and wondered if he had gotten any sleep since they had left Cambridge, or if a fear of being alone in the dark kept him awake like it did her. She held out her palm for the matches and stood, searching the muscled expanse of him when he rose to join her, unconsciously wrapping an arm around the front of her body as if suddenly aware of how vulnerable she had been, caught unawares with no chance to hide away, no time to pretend — how much had he seen? — and she swallowed.

"It's fine," she said, dismissive and only half-true, but the words seemed to steady him, if only slightly.

She couldn't even poison herself to death in peace.

"What are you _doing_ out here?"

 _Why did you have to scare him away?_


	4. A Holy War

**Chapter 4:** A Holy War

Paladin Danse had always been a confident person, and authoritarian to a fault, even before the Brotherhood of Steel gave him a nearly indestructible suit of metal armor and a loaded gun and let him play God in a world where a God didn't seem to exist. There was no time for self-doubt with the terrors of the Capital Wasteland on your heels, no room left for uncertainty when you were a child and you were alone and no-one could care enough to see that you were hurting. The city had hardened his skin into iron and the Potomac had poisoned his bones, tightened his heart, borrowed his soul and returned it mangled and dark, and though he was not a cruel man because of it, he had become a soldier far before the soldiers found him. He was decisive, and curt, and unromantic, and he honored his vows of loyalty to routine with every breath he took, because it was in repetition that he regained control. When he woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror he knew exactly what he would see looking back, and it was this fact and few others that brought him comfort; he had always known what he was, what was important. His existence fulfilled a singular role, his personality a product of necessity, his studies in technological advancement and the body he trained honed weapons for the sole entity in his life that gave him purpose. He prided himself in his simplicity.

Then Nora had found him, like a tempest drawn to the calm of an island's shore, and suddenly his disciplined way of thinking didn't seem like _enough_.

She was mystery and complication, blurred lines and choppy hair and the laughter that sung in her eyes after she lined up a killing shot, boldness and abandon, the renegade, the heretic; she was everything that he was not, and in a way that was secret and almost shameful, Danse had envied her for it. She was so completely and overwhelmingly wrong, her passion and her vitality an act of war upon the tenets that he had bled and lost for, and that she could so effortlessly _be_ and simultaneously adhere to Maxson's word of law had seemed like a sin, but he had known better than to call her a sinner. She was strong, and brave, and deserving of her rank, even when she was shouting curses at his back or defying his orders or uprooting the entirety of his once-systematic sense of morality when she insisted that the dead still had souls, that the mindless could still think, that plastic could feel pain just as she did, and he saw the method to her madness as easily as if it were a beacon in the darkness for him to follow. She was new and alive in an eternity of protocol and decay, and though she confused him to no end, she had drawn an unfamiliar sort of curiosity from a place in him that he hadn't known existed ever since their meeting outside of the police station, a place that wasn't hard or militant or purely utilitarian, and for the sake of that curiosity he had unknowingly allowed her to pervade the walls he had so painstakingly built around his weakest and innermost self. She had fought alongside him with a crude rebellion that garnered its own brand of respect, a kind of grace that was so much more honest, so much more real than anything that the Brotherhood had taught him, and though he had given her his rifle and his sponsorship after Arcjet Systems because he knew that underneath the heroics she was as much of a soldier as he was, he had also wanted to see more of her, to learn what it was that made her _her._

He had realized long ago that the reason behind her fierceness was not the deliberate, simple thing he had envisioned.

"What are you _doing_ out here?"

She had looked at him with that routine fire, and though his instincts told him to correct it, to wash it away with the cleansing alcohol and thick water of his order's doctrine, he was, to his dismay, intrigued. She was angry, somehow, and the shadows took the exhaustion in her face and twisted it until she looked twice her age, and Danse wondered absentmindedly how old she actually was; she had never told him, but he couldn't imagine her being much younger than he was. Her face was close, almost uncomfortably so, and he could see the taut ropes of fresh stitching at her jaw, a scar that he hadn't noticed beforehand tugging at the side of her chin, the freckles that only just dotted the bridge of her nose, stardust on her skin, but he held his ground, or a least as much of what was not already lost to him. There was a faint trace of venom in her voice, a sudden resentment as if he had interrupted something important, as he undoubtably did, and the heat that betrayed him continued to rage under his flesh. Never before would he have felt embarrassment in the company of man, let alone his subordinate, but with Nora the rules no longer held any precedence.

His brows furrowed. "I could ask the same of you, Knight," he said finally, half as a statement, a command, an _end,_ and half as a plea, her anger and, from someplace deeper, the despondency that resonated there concerning him. It was seldom that she let her passions break the facade that she was so fond of carrying, though he knew that if she was set on remaining silent his gesture might as well have gone unsaid. Her body shifted, and he was afraid for a moment that she would leave, that she would forsake him and his pitiful prying for something perhaps more worthy of her time, something better suited to her fleeting and cryptic tastes, but he saw her stop, balancing her weight on the balls of her feet and, with a calloused and steady hand that he knew had been the death to so many of their adversaries, tucked a lost strand of hair caught aflame in the sunlight behind her ear, decided upon remaining. She sighed, and the sound was faint behind her heavy lips, surveying the faraway horizon that breached the waters below them before begrudgingly looking to the pack of cigarettes that she gripped like gold in her hand, old and rotted and nearly torn to shreds, rotating it in her deft fingers. She chuckled under her breath and seemed to steel herself against the railing, iron against her palms, rigidity down her spine, a weak attempt at fortifying her heart.

"Nate used to smoke sometimes," she said plainly, as if he would understand, and he did.

"Your husband."

She nodded.

He knew that she was mourning still, could see the agony that devoured the youth in her eyes, the hesitance when she heard a song he must've sung or saw a color he must've liked or stopped to watch the shadow of a stranger in military fatigues that must've looked too much like two-hundred and ten years ago. She hardly ever spoke about him, save for that first time, and though Danse himself had never experienced the kind of intimacy he assumed one shared with their spouse, he knew to give her a wide berth, to respect her grief, that the ache she felt was not something he could begin to remedy or understand, and so they customarily favored silence. This time, however, she looked as if she wanted to continue, to elaborate, if only for a moment, unsatisfied with how quickly she had ended that wisp of a story and fidgeting in her place. He prepared himself, observing, and she took a breath that seemed forced and painful, turning so that he could no longer see the sliver of her tired face in the yellow columns of day.

"I used to tell myself that the world had ended when they put me in that thing in the vault, and that the one I woke up to wasn't real, like I had stepped off of my timeline and landed in this one. Like it didn't _matter,_ you know?"

He didn't, but he could conjure up a brief semblance of what she must've felt, alone and robbed of her family and forced into a time where nothing felt or looked or was the same, a time when she should've been dead. He thought it sounded like a living hell.

"But it does matter," she said, emboldened. "The _people_ here matter." She glanced over at him, eyes somber and searching, registering something when they met his and quickly being cast away. The light drew away from her face and hid behind a stray cloud before returning, and her expression was empty, numbed.

"I almost wish that they didn't. It would make it all so much easier."

He was at a loss, unsure of whether or not an apology would lessen the acuteness of whatever it was that had brought on this pain, of how to help, to aid a fallen sister with wounds that he couldn't see, of how to react to the overwhelming fragility of this small fragment of her honesty. She didn't seem to know how to proceed either, raising a hand to rub at the back of her neck, ruffling the uneven line of her knotted hair, slipping into the easy embrace of the quiet as if it were a dear friend. He visibly fumbled, clearing his throat, too aware that he hadn't responded when he should've, and settled on reciprocating her candor with his own.

"I came out here to think. I thought the fresh air would ..." He locked his jaw, the muscles there pulsing, searching for the right words that would not put hers to shame, and took the few strides that brought him to the spindly railing and next to her with frightening agility. He rested his arms on the iron, stiff and wary, clenching and unclenching a powerful hand around nothingness and watching as it worked.

"I'm ... _afraid -_ " He spoke the word like a curse. "- that I'm no longer capable of fulfilling my responsibility as a Paladin."

She turned to him, tall flames of hot emotion returning to lick at her face, her brows turning downwards. "What do you mean?"

He didn't meet her gaze. "The Brotherhood necessitates that a Paladin acts as a leader on the field, that they protect the men and women entrusted into their care. I'm supposed to keep people _alive_ -" Both of his hands turned to hard fists before falling limp. "- but more soldiers have died under my direct supervision than under anyone else's since we entered the Commonwealth."

She stared at him, incredulous, her mouth opening and closing in a battle against her judgment before she spoke again. "You're blaming yourself for something that you had absolutely no control over -"

"I had more control over the deaths of those men than I had any right to."

He looked at her then, feeling the truth in the statement and the echo of the wall as it crumbled to dust behind his thoughts, baring himself to her, and he hid behind the nonchalant bravado of his voice. He remembered their names; he counted them off to himself before he fell asleep at night, and then they haunted him through his dreams and turned the dark in his room into nightmares, scored like tally-marks into the backs of his eyelids: Worwick. Dawes. Keane. Brach. He was with them all when they died, or when they otherwise took the blows that would later prove fatal to them. He had seen their final breaths, their parting prayers, parts of them he was never meant to see, exposed and sliced open, the whites of their eyes as they rolled back into their heads — eyes that had once looked up to him and trusted him and relied on the experience of their superior that he knew now was useless. What Nora witnessed flicker through him had apparently sobered her, and she shook her head in muted defiance as he continued.

"I could have saved them, but I didn't. Their lives ended because of me." He shrugged, accepting the reality of his failure like it was as much a fact to him as the color of the sky, as if that were the last of it, disgust turning his face grey as if he were physically ill.

She fell silent for a while, and he listened to his heart dance against his ribcage with the life he had stolen, the life that shouldn't have been his, before she stepped forward, bending her head so that she could reach his downturned gaze.

"I'm willing to bet that the only reason they survived for as long as they did was because of you."

She said it with such confidence, and he almost believed her, but it was a lie, a pleasantry, and he started to turn away. She reached out and pushed against his shoulder with her palm as he did, successfully rotating his body so that when he looked up he had nowhere to run, her face and its frown and its scorching eyes taking up his field of vision, and before he could say a word in protest she raised a hand between them to stop him and glared him down, unwavering.

"You're the best fucking soldier on this glorified balloon, Danse." She jabbed her finger into his chest, and he wondered if it would be a reoccurring stance between them. "I've seen what men with fancier armor and a longer set of titles than you do when they're down there on the ground, face to face with a dying world, and it isn't pretty. Don't let them make you forget the kind of person you are."

He peered down at her through his dark lashes, the scar in his brow twitching in confusion, and his eyes ran over her expression, searching. "What kind of person am I?"

She withdrew, crossing her arms, and grinned up at him, little and dry and only half-sad. "The kind that saves my unworthy ass on a daily basis."

His mouth moved on its own accord to match hers at that, and he allowed the smile to grow on his lips like spreading wildfire as he looked at her and her harsh rebel's compassion, pressing into him and making it's mark on muscles greatly underused, nightmares momentarily discarded. He caught something odd, something fierce and unnamable rush through her as she stood opposite to him, still careful, still distant, before she looked away, and she chuckled, the sound breathy and fractured as it hissed from between her teeth.

"You know what I think?"

He shook his head, a ghost of a grin still hanging onto him, stubborn. "No, I don't."

"I think you need to buy me that drink, now."

* * *

They left the foredeck and walked through the Prydwen together, silent but at ease, Danse hovering just slightly behind as Nora stopped by Proctor Ingram's workstation to see how a modification of her power armor's chest plate was coming along, eventually offering to have her join them at the bar when she was finished. The abundance of seats in the mess hall were mostly empty, as it was barely past noon and he was fairly certain that any responsible Brotherhood personnel would've been doing anything but getting a drink with their commanding officer, and so when Danse asked the bartender for the dark bottle of 2070 that had begun to collect dust in the far reaches of the back cabinet, stowed away after reconnaissance outside the airport and once thought a secret, there weren't many faces to cast their judgment upon him; Nora, however, was visibly and vocally surprised, and made it clear that if he knew of any other hidden bottles he should consequently share their locations with her immediately. He promised her that this was an isolated event, warning her to take it slow, that he needed her sharp, that she would thank him in the morning when they were out on assignment and she didn't have a headache that split her in two, and then she promptly downed three shots of the whiskey, patting him on the back with a warm and weighted hand, whispering that Elder Maxson would be telling him all about it later.

He had stared at her, not understanding. "What?"

"Shh! Here," She poured a bit of the cloudy liquid into a glass of his own. "You'll need something in you when he calls you down."

The drink tasted sour and sat in his stomach like a stone, watery and weak and opened centuries too late, but the company otherwise lifted his spirits. He didn't so much as talk with Nora as listen to her, her words beginning to slur and her laugh bubbling unfiltered from between flushing lips as she told him about nothing in particular, and soon Ingram had decided to take her up on her offer, ducking under the doorframe with a screech of metal on metal and a face dirtied with oil and sweat, and the two of them sat and exchanged cheers and began to tell stories that he hadn't known existed. It was a precious moment, and he watched them when he wasn't worrying the glass in his hand, listened when his thoughts weren't chiding him for his procrastination, his borderline negligence, but eventually he stood and excused himself to leave. He needed to move, to do something with his hands; there was a dent in the back plating of his armor, he told them, and he didn't feel right leaving it unattended for so long already. Nora caught his eye on his way out and held it, fire and steel, knowing and forgiving, before nodding her farewell.

He thought she had become too perceptive for her own good.

He was bent over the blue flame of the blowtorch for more time than what was necessary, the sun having begun its descent into the waters outside, turning what he could see of the sky pink and tired and flecked with the promise of stars. The heat against his skin was a welcome distraction, the beads of sweat that fell from his nose and bounced against his hands making a rhythm with which he fell in line, and soon his back ached and his knees burned and his entire suit had been smoothed over with fire. When he was satisfied with his half-day's worth of work, he stood and stretched out his arms behind him, returning his tools to their proper place on the workbench to his side and admiring the gleam of the proud steel, the kinks and the battle scars now faint behind polish and the few fresh stripes of Brotherhood-crimson paint, nodding to himself before stepping to grab a piece of stray cloth to rub at the grease on his long tinker's fingers. It hadn't been long since he had last worked on his armor, but the motions brought him peace, and though talking and drinking was plenty nice in the right circumstances, he would much rather be alone and with a job to do, no matter how menial, no matter how mindless; _boring_ was not a word used often in his vocabulary, as Danse had lived and breathed nothing but excitement and action and war for years, and for every second of the unremarkable he was thankful. He could spend hours completing a single task, reveling in its simplicity, absorbing and consuming, making sure every move counted, every step was meaningful, burning it all into memory for when gunfire thundered across an alley or when a grenade's explosion blocked out the sun or when he saw blood start to stain the side of Nora's uniform like Brotherhood-crimson and she was too stubborn to admit she had been hit, too vain to show him - _damn it, let me_ help _you_ \- and he had to stop his hands from shaking or else they both would've been caught aflame and reduced to ash like the world a long time ago.

He wondered absentmindedly if she was as irresponsible with whiskey as she was in the field.

Her name flitting across the edges of his mind caused him to hesitate in his place, and he looked over and across the room to her own workbench, cluttered with blueprints and rusty wrenches and nearly-empty Nuka Cola bottles as if she really was put there just to spite him. He walked over as he wiped at the back of his neck with the cloth, his footsteps echoing, brushing away a few papers and crumpled wrappers with an idle hand to get to the body of a sniper rifle that lay collapsed underneath, knowing it for what it was and picking it up with a care he would not have shown otherwise. He had seen her working on it, her gentle resolve, had seen her frustration when she stripped it bare, humbled by the sophistication of its skeleton, and though he admired her commitment, he was afraid that she wouldn't see it finished for months to come if she continued at her pace. He turned it over in his palms once, appreciating the weight of the machinery, and dropped heavily onto the oil-splattered chair that accompanied Nora's bench, his attention set on the rifle with a determined glare as he took a discarded screwdriver in his free hand and returned once again to the deafening silence of his work.

* * *

It was hours later and he was on his way to his room to wash away the grime that had begun to itch on his skin when he saw Nora again, and though her smile was loose and her cheeks were warm and her feet tripped over themselves with every few steps, he was relieved to see that she hadn't spent the entire afternoon drowning her senses in drink with Ingram. He stopped just short of her, taking in her customarily disheveled appearance with a lenient gaze and an attempt at an almost-smile, the creaks and moans and tremulous trickles of sound as the Pydwen slept slowly dying away into the night until they were well and truly alone. He bowed his head towards her once in greeting. "Evening, Knight."

"Hey, Danser," she said, her own toothy grin coming easily and without hesitation, bold and brilliant, light bouncing in her eyes. She looked him up and down quickly. "You okay?"

He pursed his lips for a moment, squared his shoulders without realizing, filling the tight hallway with the breadth of him. "Affirmative."

She nodded slowly as she watched him, running her gaze over the ashy splotches and tired lines of his unshaven face with a cruel intensity, and he felt familiar heat rise to meet her judgment. When her hungry stare was satiated she suddenly turned towards the direction of the sleeping quarters, gesturing for him to join her. "Walk me home?"

He kept still for a moment, stealing an exasperated glance down the corridor and to where the door to his room stood in the shadows, faraway and beckoning, before he silently fell into step with her, matching her stride as she led him to her bed with just enough distance between them so that he could still reach out to steady her if the alcohol in her decided to rear its vengeful head. He was thankful that he had left his power armor in its bay as they weaved between bunks of snoring Knights, the few left awake to read or scrub at their rifles doing their best to ignore the lumbering man and his loud Paladin's boots, the occasional glow off of a lantern and the small blue lights that freckled the catwalks above like a mechanic's cold imitation of stars enough to illuminate their path. Nora raised a finger between them to stop him at what he assumed what her bedside table, bending down swiftly to grab at something he couldn't see before standing again, worrying the object for a moment in her fingers before holding it out to him; a holotape, label scratched and peeling, and he didn't understand.

"I found this when we were in Cambridge. I listened to it already a couple times — it's pretty good. I thought you could play it on that terminal in your room ..." She shrugged, unsure of where to place her feet, and bent to push the cartridge into his slackened hand until she was sure he had taken it. He looked down at it as if it were unrecognizable, as if the plastic stung at his fingertips and the feeling of something pressing into his palm was a foreign concept, as if he had never received a gift before, because he hadn't, not really, and he wasn't sure why Nora had taken it upon herself to be the first to bestow one. A thorough confusion drew down his thick brows and the corners of his lips like it had attached invisible strings to the points of his face, sickly hands wringing out his insides, but simultaneously his chest swelled with immense gratitude, and he grasped the tape firmly, a part of him uncaring for her intentions and clinging to the general meaning behind the gesture with a sweet surge of strength. He felt her searching eyes bore into the space between his bones and quickly cleared his throat.

"Thank you," he said, easing the warmth back into his gaze as he looked at her again, and he felt the air around them calm.

She smirked up at him before shifting to sit on the side of her bed, stretching out a leg with a sigh and squeezing her eyes closed only briefly, the constellation of lamplight above her too bright, too close, and she chuckled once under her breath, shaking her head so that her tousled hair brushed softly against her face. She pointed a slender finger up at him. "Also? Don't run into the middle of any more Super Mutant armies, okay? At least not without me."

His smile was secret and crooked as he stepped away, beginning to turn to leave, and though the memory of them the day before, surrounded and dying because of his carelessness, his fury, was bitter, he knew that he could remember their eventual victory with pride. "Not without you," he promised, and he realized he meant it, and his arms shook with the weight of that truth. "I'll see you bright and early, Knight," he shot over his shoulder as he retraced his steps, the holotape warm and insistent against his skin.

She laughed aloud as she lay draped over the bed. "Good luck with that one, Paladin," she half-shouted after him, and his fist clenched by his side as the deadly smile in her voice sent a joyful and frightening jolt down to the base of his spine, and he felt as if he had lost right then and there, had finally fallen, a soldier bested by just that very sound, and he breathed heavy in defeat as he welcomed the quiet of the hallway again.

What he didn't admit couldn't hurt him.


End file.
